[The following article discusses rape and other forms of sexual
assault as they are depicted in video games. Please avoid reading further if
this subject upsets you.]

Video games seldom take a responsible tone when addressing rape. It’s rare to see a title acknowledge sexual assault as
anything more than an exploitative dash, a cheap, nasty surprise for a vulnerable and usually female character. It’s a
brilliant package deal for the careless writer beleaguered with demands for
maturity. What better way to paint a villain as instantly loathsome, stoke the
player’s righteous fury, and elevate your game above the childish superficialities of past eras! After all, trashy
films, sleazy anime, and execrable comics with titles like Stormfang Saga do
it, so why shouldn't video games?

The latest such attempt is in Metal Gear Solid V: Ground
Zeroes. It drops the elder of the saga’s two Snake operatives into a secret
American military compound, from which he must rescue operatives Paz and
Chico. Along the way, the player can uncover recordings of the game’s villain,
Skullface, torturing the prisoners. Both Paz and Chico are raped. Chico is
forced to rape Paz. The audio log concludes with Skullface and his surgeon
planting two explosive devices in Paz—the second one apparently hidden in her
vagina. Should you doubt this, the scene provides the squelching, visceral
sounds of a bomb going somewhere it probably shouldn’t.

This may be the most horrifying of Metal Gear creator Hideo
Kojima’s uses of rape, but it sure isn’t the first. The original Metal Gear
Solid strongly implies that Meryl is sexually assaulted during Revolver
Ocelot’s torture sequence, the second game finds once-laughable nerd Otacon
confessing that his stepmother raped him, the third has some disturbing notes
about undercover agent Eva, and Metal Gear Solid 4 luridly mixes sexuality and
trauma into The Beauty and the Beast Corps. The entire Metal Gear Solid web
weaves together grim realities and goofy fourth-wall assaults, and Kojima’s
infusion of radio-drama rape and vagina disploda is both, entwining the absurd and the horrific.

Kojima is no lone provocateur. Numerous other games
trot out rape scenes with all the care of a backhandedly misogynistic romance
novel, a torture-porn flick, or the Raveonettes’ “Boys Who Rape (Should All Be
Destroyed).” You can find it callously applied in Heavy Rain’s TV-movie
interludes, F.E.A.R. 2’s finale, and just about any game where a female
character’s backstory boils down to “she was raped” and little else.

Is that all video games can do? Do any of them treat the
subject with a modicum of respect?